Monday’s Friend: Luke Walker

Today I am pleased to welcome back one of my favourite repeat guests, British horror writer Luke Walker. Luke has just released his first collection of short stories, entitled Die Laughing. I haven’t read this one yet, so cannot at this time verify the scariness of the contents, but that cover – eek! What is it about clowns?

Anyway, welcome once more to Imaginary Friends, Luke! Good to have you back.

THE POWER OF FICTION
By Luke Walker

My collection Die Laughing contains eighteen stories that vary in length from 1200 words to about 9000, a story titled The Unmarked Grave. Now, 9k is getting on the long side for a short piece. It isn’t novella territory by any means—probably more novelette. It came a few months ago when I had a strange dream that involved me back in an area in which I used to live. I rounded a corner to see the road lined with shops and homes, heading towards buildings that grew progressively older until they became Victorian. Not just Victorian. Old. Decaying and close to abandoned, they were as creepy as you’d want in an horror film from Hammer; the creepy factor helped by the gloomy light and the fog that became thicker as I walked closer to it. My last clear image after waking was of a small church and its graveyard, both disused, both cold and lonely. While I had no idea what the dream meant, the imagery stayed with me and niggled until I came up with a plot that fit it. That plot, without giving too much away, involves Jack the Ripper (who else, given the imagery?) and a couple with the bad luck to become involved in long-dead history. I’m very happy with the finished story that came from a simple dream, and the dream no longer pokes and prods at me to turn it into fiction.

As horrible as The Unmarked Grave is (and as horrible as the other stories are), there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve included a piece called How To Live Forever as a sort of bonus album track. I could have placed it as the last story and been done with it, but I do see Die Laughing as finishing with a story set in a pub followed by a minute or so of silence before the bonus track kicks in. As How To Live Forever isn’t horror, you could argue it doesn’t fit in the collection. I say otherwise because the power of fiction to horrify, amuse or entertain is a power we shouldn’t ignore or overlook especially in difficult times. Fiction, even of the unpleasant, frightening sort, can save us. While things don’t work out for all of my characters in the stories and it sometimes doesn’t work out for us, we have to remember that sometimes it does.

The differences between the horror, despair and downer that is The Unmarked Grave and the slightly silly, slightly hopeful celebration of fiction that is How To Live Forever is my small way of reminding myself and anyone else who needs to hear it that sometimes it does work out.

Author bio:

Luke Walker has been reading and writing horror and fantasy fiction for as long as he can remember—probably since the age of eight when he borrowed his dad’s collection of Stephen King books before doing the same with his brother’s James Herbert’s. His first two novels, now out of print, were published in 2012 and 2013. His Lovecraftian novella, Mirror of the Nameless, was published by DarkFuse in 2013, and he’s currently at work on a new novel as well as another novella. He is thirty-seven and lives in England with his wife, two cats and more horror dvds than he knows what to do with.

Learn more about Luke from his website, or follow him on Twitter.

Die Laughing is available in paperback and Kindle format from Amazon UK and Amazon US.

 

 

BristolCon 2013

(Cross-posted on the WriteClub blog)

This year will see my first attendance at BristolCon, a one-day convention organised by the Bristol Fantasy & SF Society, in its fifth year.

This year’s event takes place on 26 October, and now that the programme has been officially released I am pleased to be able to announce my programme items.  I am going to be quite busy for this one.

I am kicking off at 10:00 am with a panel on innovative deaths.  Lots of scope there for interesting discussion, I am sure.  Between now and then I shall be trying to come up with new and gruesome ways of killing people.  All in the name of research, of course.

At 2:00 pm there will be a mass signing for all authors present, and an opportunity to sell books, and I will be pitching up there with copies of SOUL SCREAMS.  I’ll also be happy to sign anything that contains one of my stories, and I’m putting this out as a challenge to try and find who’s got the oldest publication.  Has anyone out there got an old copy of PEEPING TOM with my story in?  Or, to go even further back, the October 1989 issue of FEAR?  If anyone brings me one of these to sign I’ll give them a free copy of one of my books.

At 4:00 pm I am moderating my first panel – on the pros and cons of small press publishing.  I am really excited about this, as I think it’s a perfect topic for me to be moderating, and there are lots of discussion points on this subject to put to the panel.

There are many other fabulous items on the very full programme, and if you are able to get to Bristol for the day do consider coming along – there aren’t too many Cons that you can do in their entirety in a day, and the membership for this one is a mere £20.  A bargain for the price.

Britain’s most established genre Cons are BFS FantasyCon and EasterCon, but it’s reassuring to see a rise in the number of smaller Cons that start out as small local gatherings and gradually get bigger every year.  The UK may be too small to compete with the US for the number of Cons, but there’s no doubt that the number of SF/Fantasy/Horror fans in this country is on the rise.  And where fans gather, Cons will happen.  The only down side is there are now so many fantastic Cons, I have to decide each year which ones I’m going to do.  I have neither the leave allocation nor the finances to do all of them.  I wish I could.

If you make it to BristolCon, do seek me out – it would be great to see you (if nothing else, as a reassurance that people do actually read this blog).  In the meantime however, I must dash.  I’ve got to go and think up some intelligent questions to ask my panel.

SOUL SCREAMS Comes To Life!

(Cross-posted on the WriteClub blog)

When my first novel SUFFER THE CHILDREN was published, the whole process was one thrill after another. The first time I saw the cover. The first (and second, and third) occasion I had a reason to say “I have to email my editor”. Every round of edits was exciting.

And then the complete published novel arrived, in the form of a zip folder containing all the available e-book formats it was available in. That was an incredibly exciting moment – knowing that my novel was Published. I got so excited I tried to open all the files at once and crashed the machine. There was no hard copy, it was e-book only, but it was thrilling nonetheless.

SOUL SCREAMS is the first of my books that is being made available as a print version, and this means there’s been a new round of ‘first time thrills’. The first time I saw a JPG of the whole cover, front and back, was an exciting moment. It was also the first time I’ve had ‘celebrity endorsements’ on a cover, too – very exciting.

And then I was told the proofs had been ordered. Just the thought that there was a paper book out there, with my name on the cover – for some inexplicable reason that got me rather excited.

Then my editor at Stumar Press informed me that my uncorrected proof was on its way to me. He took pictures of the book before he put it in the post and emailed them to me. Monday afternoon, he told me, it had gone in the post. So I awaited its arrival with baited breath. I got home from work yesterday – Tuesday – a little hopeful but not really expecting anything. The Post Office is not usually that reliable. I figured it was going to take a couple of days to arrive.

But then, as I stood on my doorstep fumbling for my keys, through the frosted glass of my front door I could see, sitting on the door mat inside, a white jiffy bag. Exactly book-sized. I knew then that it had arrived. I was so excited I had trouble putting my keys in my own front door.

I dragged out that moment for a while. Savouring the envelope, before ripping it open and holding in my hands, for the first time, a paperback book with my name on the cover. And then I felt the urge to take a photo, and post said photo all over the Internet broadcasting the fact that my book has been brought to life (attached herewith).

It’s these thrills that make all the heartache involved in being a writer worthwhile. But I’m wondering if I’m marking myself a rank amateur by getting excited at every step. Does one become accustomed to success? When you’ve got a dozen published novels under your belt, does laying eyes on the first one off the printing press no longer give you a thrill? I’d like to think that it’s always exciting, no matter how many books you get published, but maybe I’m being idealistic.

I still hold onto the dream that one day I’ll be in a position to know the answer to this. When I am, I’ll be sure to let you know.

SOUL SCREAMS Cover Revealed

(Cross-posted on the WriteClub blog)

Stumar Press have an updated announcement about SOUL SCREAMS on their website…and the cover is revealed.  Which means I can broadcast it here.

I am quite excited about this cover.  The idea behind the title is that this is a collection of stories all about the angst and darkness within the soul.  And I think the screaming woman sums that up rather well.  I also like the blackened trees and bats in the background, against a dark brooding sky…

Release has been confirmed for June. And, as mentioned before, there will be a print version of this one. So, if you’re one of those people who insist that paper is better than e-book, there’s no excuse for you not to buy this one.

We’ve got some nice cover quotes, too. For more information, check out Stumar Press’s website.

And so the countdown to the next release is on! Keep an eye on this space. As soon as the book is available to order, you’ll be the first to know.

Coming Soon…

(Cross-posted from WriteClub)

I am pleased to be able to announce that my next publishing project is in the pipeline. A collection of my short stories, with the working title of SOUL SCREAMS, will be released as an e-book and POD version, with a scheduled publication date of February 2012.

I’m working with a new e-publisher for this project, but their editor I know well and have worked with in the past, and I have every faith in them.  The anthology will contain previously published short stories, as well as some unpublished ones.  They are all horror-themed, but much of my earlier work dealt with psychological horror rather than supernatural horror, and characters in very dark places.  It’s not going to be an uplifting read, put it that way.  Unlike my novels, my short stories rarely end happily.

I am not able to say much more about this project at this time, but I am very excited about working on it. I will release more information soon, so be sure to watch this space!

The Angst Of The Writer

(Cross-posted on the WriteClub blog)

I was re-reading some of my old short stories the other day.  During the 1990s, I had reasonable success in getting some of them published.  The small press was booming in the UK in those days, and there were a lot of markets for short horror fiction.  Most of them were ‘semi pro’ magazines – paying half a pence a word if you were lucky, and a free copy of the magazine if you weren’t.  But still, if you were a horror writer there were a lot of places to submit your work.

A lot of the stories I had published were early works – things I wrote in my late teens and early twenties. Only when I look back in retrospect do I realise how horribly depressing they were.

The thing is, though, I’ve always used writing as a way of working through my issues. And I guess I’ve had a lot of issues. Certain themes recurred frequently in my writing: betrayal; loss; loneliness; isolation; a fatalistic outlook that we’re all doomed to die miserable and alone. A lot of my early horror is more about psychological despair than a Big Bad – and it almost always ends with someone dying in pain and alone.

There are times when I sink into what feels like a deep dark pit, often for no apparent reason, and I wallow there a while. Sometimes it’s days, sometimes it’s weeks. During these times I get out of bed and carry on with my life but I often feel like I’m just going through the motions. And I try to avoid blogging at these times, because no one likes a whinger and it’s not fair to inflict my misery on everyone else. The thing is, though, these feelings always pass, usually disappearing as quickly as they come. So I just ride it out and listen to Muse very loudly on my MP3 player until I feel like I’ve crawled out of the pit.

Sometimes I think writing is my salvation, because I’ve always used it to try and deal with these feelings. My grandmother, disapproving of what I wrote, used to ask me why I couldn’t write any “happy” stories. I replied that there was no point. Happy feelings I want to hold onto. It’s the feelings of misery and despair I try to exorcise, and that’s why they end up in my stories.

The writing has kept me sane. If I didn’t have it to help me work through these feelings of despair, I probably would have thrown myself under a bus years ago. On the other hand, if I didn’t have these angsty periods I probably wouldn’t be a writer, since just about all writers I know also experience these feelings, to a greater or lesser degree.

Is it better to have the angst and be a writer, or be completely sane and not be? That’s an impossible question to answer, because I’ve never known life as anything other than an angsty writer.

On a slightly more positive note, I think I’ve worked through many of my issues, and that might be why I don’t write such depressing short stories anymore. There’s still plenty of death and despair in my writing, but my recently-published novels have at least featured some semblance of a happy ending in the sense that the main characters work through their issues and move on. It’s one thing to be angsty when you’re 18. It’s another to still be angsty at 40. There are some lessons about life that should have been learned by the time you enter your fourth decade, and one of them is that there are some things you just have to let go.

Writing Processes – Part 5: First Acceptance

When I finished school in 1988, I moved back to England, and began in earnest my quest to get my short stories published. I learned two things fairly quickly. First of all, the short horror story market was a rich vein (no pun intended) in the late 1980s, and there were a lot of magazines around – pro and semi pro – publishing the sort of nasty little stories I was writing.

Secondly, I was now in the grown-up world and things were very different. As a minor, everyone had been terribly supportive of my writing – presumably not wishing to crush my fragile adolescent soul. But once I passed the age of 18, I was an adult – at least in British law – and I was just one of many people writing and submitting. I was not a special little snowflake, and my form rejection letters reflected that.

It was a harsh lesson, but I’d been researching the whole process of submitting, and I’d come to understand that one must expect rejection, and not take it personally. I’d also been researching where to send my stories. One day browsing the newsagents in my lunch break (as I’d left school and entered adulthood, I’d also entered the scary world of Working for a Living), I came across a magazine called FEAR. As well as articles and reviews on books and movies in the horror genre – and covers that would offend most people of a fragile nature – they featured short stories by new writers in every issue. Aha, a market for me, I thought, and after buying and studying an issue, I sent to them a story called “The Top Floor”. I’d written it at age 17, and it was about a young man who goes to visit his friend in his new apartment, and stumbles across a ghostly re-enactment of a murderer who butchered his family in the apartment block years before.

It was a story with flaws, there is no doubt about that. But it was set on Friday October 13 (yes, it was also full of clichés) and 1989 – the year I submitted it to FEAR – was a year that October 13 happened to fall on a Friday. I think this appealed to the editors. They accepted the story, and it appeared in the Hallowe’en issue that year. They also paid me £50 for this.

I admit I got a little smug. I was 19, I’d just sold a story for what was, I thought at the time, a considerable amount of money, and I thought I’d got it made.

Sadly, reality swiftly crept in. That £50 was a lot of money. It’s more than I’ve ever made, collectively, from my writing in the 21 years since then, including all the royalties I’ve had from SUFFER THE CHILDREN.

I learned I couldn’t give up the day job if I was to continue writing. But I also learned that what I was writing was publishable, and it paid to be persistent.

The rejection letters continued to come, but I framed that first acceptance letter and to this day it hangs on the wall in my ‘writing corner’, to remind me of the day I first became a ‘proper’ writer.